Pages tagged "economy"

Left activists need to understand the crisis of austerity being imposed by European bankers on Greece, Spain, Italy and Portugal, among others. A catastrophe on the scale of the Great Depression has been forced upon Greece for over five years under the deceptive description of a “bailout.”

Lets start with a few basics usually not considered in the corporate media descriptions of the crisis.

What happened ?

1. In 2010 and 2011, mainly German and French banks in pursuit of high profits made massive loans to Greek firms. When the banks recognized that this was a high risk, they were bailed out (not Greece) by transferring the debt from the banks to the public institutions like the European Central Bank and the IMF. Now the ECB and the IMF are trying to force the Greek government to cut pensions, education, salaries, and health care to pay for the bail out of the banks.

History documents gross inequality: kings and lords took what they could, and peasants struggled along as they might. An intermediate “middle class” of favored underlings provided structural reinforcement then; a similar middle-management group provides legitimacy and reinforcement now for the richest 85 people in the world who own the same value of assets and wealth as the 3,500,000,000 poorest.

Extreme inequality is nothing new. What interrupted its reign was democracy, with its implicit promise of opportunity for all. Democracy did for a time equalize wealth—at least to a degree—in the modern industrialized nations where democracy was, in various forms, adopted.

In the United States, democracy ushered in a relative equalization of income and wealth: the Great Compression, a mid-twentieth-century narrowing of monetary difference between the top 1% and the bottom 90% of the population. This is shown in the central part of Figure 1 (above).

As democratic socialists, we have a long-term vision and, by necessity, a long-term strategy. At the same time, we must understand the current terrain in order to get us from here to there. Last month’s election results were disastrous for the Democratic Party and, by extension, the progressive movement. Not just because who holds state power has real implications (should we hold our breath about a national right-to-work law or more governors enacting policies from the ALEC playbook?), but also because, for many people, elections are their only engagement with the political process, and they engage in elections around one of the two major parties.

The July “Employment Situation” report from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has stimulated a range of responses. On the plus side for workers, over 200,000 additional people were employed compared to June. This extended the string of positive job numbers for private sector employers to 52 months, among the longest on record. Over the past 12 months, the U.S. economy has generated a little over 2 million new jobs.

So, what can we say about who is and who isn’t employed? And, are there any concerns that remain about the recovery from the “Great Recession?”

The answer to the latter question is, unfortunately, yes. And that yes is connected to who has – and more to who has not – the jobs that have been created over the five plus years since the official end of the Great Recession.

OK, the April employment report continued the string of now 50 straight months of job growth in the private sector – almost unprecedented – and we’re roughly back to where we were in late 2007, just before the official beginning of the “Great Recession.” The top-line number for the report on April job creation was 288,000 new jobs and a decline in the unemployment rate to 6.3%. In many economic recoveries in the post-WWII years, this would be good news and worth celebrating. But the Long Depression that began in 2007 is far from over, and I don’t mean just that the number of long-term unemployed remains higher than in any other post-recession period or that the labor force participation rate is lower than at any time since the early 1980s, both of which are true. I mean the underlying problem, that the US economy is a failure in achieving the core goal of any modern economy: generating living wage jobs for all willing and able to work.

Join Steve Max, a founder of the legendary community organizing school, the Midwest Academy, to practice talking about socialism in plain language. Create your own short rap. Use your personal experience and story to explain democratic socialism. Prepare for those conversations about socialism that happen when you table or canvass. This workshop is for those who have already had an introduction to democratic socialism, whether from DSA's webinar or from other sources. Questions? Contact Theresa Alt <talt@igc.org> 607-280-7649.

DSA was concerned to find out that the company that provides our website and online organizing infrastructure, NationBuilder, had as a client the Trump campaign and other right-wing candidates. Progressives built this kind of infrastructure and tools for digital organizing and we have now lost that organizing edge. We are moving to identify other options for a CMS/CRM. As an under-resourced, member funded organization, this move will take time for us to carry out, but it is an important statement for us to make.